"Democratic superdelegates may have the legal right to thwart the will of Democratic primary voters and caucus goers..."

"... but they do no not have the moral right to do so," writes Chris Bowers, threatening — like Donna Brazile — to quit the party if the superdelegates determine the nominee. What's morally wrong with following the rules that everyone knew all along? Parties aren't morally obligated to use a purely democratic approach to picking a nominee. The Democrats set up a system with some delegates who were there because of their position in the party and not as representatives of people who voted in primaries or caucused. They were authorized to exercise their independent judgment about who the party should nominate, in what looks like a check on freewheeling democracy. Why should they now be told to subordinate their independent judgment?

What's the matter with Kansas?

Get with the program, people!

Pimp.

Just something I happened to see today when I stopped into Stinky Brooklyn, that store on Smith Street.

"As the red light atop the camera went dark... there was still much more I wanted to say to Chris Matthews, much more that I needed to say."

Ridiculous, humorless self-dramatizing from Kate Michelman. [Click the "Enter Salon" box in the upper right corner.]

I can't find the video clip, but from Michelman's own account, it seems that Matthews was just phrasing the question provocatively to set up her response:

Knowing that I had just announced my support for Barack Obama for president after having earlier supported my old friend John Edwards, Matthews had me on his show Monday. His first Hardball to me was one of his typical zingers: "Kate Michelman, how does it feel to have abandoned the cause of your life?"

The simple answer, Chris, is that I haven't -- in fact, my endorsement of Barack, just like my earlier embrace of John Edwards, is all about exalting the causes of my life. Not about repudiating them...

Blah blah blah.

Of course, I completely agree with her that women don't have to vote for Hillary to be true to feminism.

Matthews' other Hardball, which also deserved more time than the red light gave me, was:

"How can you pass, Kate, on the opportunity to support a woman for president when this may be the last chance for that to happen in your lifetime?"

I don't think that's a different "hardball." Sounds like he had a hook for the segment and you didn't take the bait vigorously enough to justify having you on, so he tried again. It was pretty mean of him to insinuate that you're really old, but you do sound awfully fusty. You don't need more time. You need to take advantage of the opportunity given by the question and slam your point home. Not seethe and go write a wordy, grim Salon piece about it.

The 2,000-car, 12-hour traffic jam on I-90.

In Madison. From the 911 call transcripts:

7:25 p.m.

Caller: You've got people ... been sitting out here since 11 o'clock this morning. They're out here taking craps in the middle of the highway because there's no place to go. I talked to two guys that's diabetics. No food. Where in the heck is the road commissioner or somebody? Ain't doing nothing for nobody out here.

I've never had a dog.

But if I were to get a dog — is it crazy of me after all these years to think of getting a dog? — what kind of dog would it be?

NBC wimped out over "pimped out."

David Shuster said — about Chelsea Clinton — "Doesn't it seem like she's being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"



Now, MSNBC has suspended him, after pressure from the Clinton campaign:

Behind the scenes, Phil Griffin, senior vice president at MSNBC, took the criticism over Shuster's remarks from the Clinton camp especially seriously, and Tim Russert helped mediate the situation, according to sources.

But one high-level NBC source told Politico that apologizing was an act of cowardice on behalf of the network.

"This is at least the second time they've caved to the Hillary Clinton campaign," a source told Politico, referring to Chris Matthews' recent apology over remarks he recently made about Clinton that were widely denounced as sexist. "What does this do to journalism?"

Really, how bad is it to say "pimped out"? Is it "nappy-headed hos" bad? Did anyone think Shuster was literally calling Chelsea a whore or even making any reference to her womanly virtue? "Pimped out" is a common colloquialism these days. According to the Urban Dictionary, which gives a good read on how young people use words, the connotations having to do with exaggerated fashion and style predominate.

Even if the clear associations with prostitution remain, we often make figurative references to prostitution in speech, and the cause of feminism is not served by requiring special limitations when we're talking about women. We ought to be able to call a female publicity hound a "media whore."

I've never watched "Tucker," the show Shuster was guest-hosting when he made the supposedly offensive remark, but if the conversation there is casual and slang is the norm, then saying "pimped out" about Chelsea should be taken in stride. Otherwise it looks as though NBC caved to the Clintons.

ADDED: Ugh! Here's Shuster groveling:



"All Americans should be proud of Chelsea Clinton"? Why? Because, sublimely privileged, she went to work for a hedge fund? And, generally, why should anyone be "proud of" someone else's children? Plus, Chelsea isn't a kid anymore! I think saying "All Americans should be proud of Chelsea Clinton" is offensive. Please fire David Shuster.

AND: Out in the real world today, I had an encounter with the word "pimp." Plus, the dominant meaning of the word today — relating to style — may be the original meaning, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

pimp
1607, perhaps from M.Fr. pimper "to dress elegantly" (16c.), prp. of pimpant "alluring in dress, seductive." Weekley suggests M.Fr. pimpreneau, defined in Cotgrave (1611) as "a knave, rascall, varlet, scoundrell." The word also means "informer, stool pigeon" in Australia and New Zealand and in S.Africa, where by early 1960s it existed in Swahili form impimpsi. The verb is attested from 1636. Pimpmobile first recorded 1973.

MORE: The Moderate Voice has a big roundup of the commentary, which does not just break down along partisan lines. For example, Jane Hamsher said:

It may surprise everyone but I actually wasn't bothered by [what Shuster said]. The phrase is ubiquitous, I use it all the time and although it is a loaded term my initial impression was that in the wake of all the truly awful sexist stuff that's come down the pipeline from MSNBC over the course of this campaign, much of which I have personally railed about, this just didn't fall into that category.

At first I thought it might be because I know Shuster and don't think he has the women's issues that many on MSNBC seem to have, and maybe that was affecting my assessment of the situation. But I wrote a post recently about Ben Affleck appearing at a press conference for the SEIU in Boston, and shortly after it went live someone involved in helping me put together the story sent me an email wondering what the hell I was thinking linking to a headline that said something on the order of "Boston Mayor Pimps For Healthcare Workers." I wasn't sure what they were upset about either at the time, but after a moment I realized that the term probably didn't strike others as being as inert as it did me so I changed the link.

I understand that this situation is different, we're talking about a young woman and Hillary Clinton has been on the receiving end of a lot of really misogynistic and disrespectful shit from MSNBC and that on the heels of that, a comment which overtly compared her daughter to a prostitute probably did not sit too well. Still, if you asked me, I'd say that while I certainly understand that others might feel differently, for me this was a minor infraction.

And if anyone thinks my comment here is partisan, remember that I just defended Randi Rhodes (and I've been arguing the free speech side of nearly every dispute over the 4-year life of this blog).

I have made a photograph of the way I feel.

(The title of this post is an movie allusion that perhaps only I understand, but if you do, my virtual embrace goes out to you.)

Fujita, grilled?

The other day I disparaged the pathetic Madison, Wisconsin newspaper, The Capital Times, for its inane letter publishing policy. I must continue the theme. On January 26, 2008, it published a long letter from area 9/11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett. Excerpts, with my boldface:

I am out of a job because The Capital Times and other mainstream media outlets refuse to report the news....

Along with hundreds of other scholars, engineers, architects, and former high-level military, intelligence and executive branch officials..., I have pointed out that the official story of 9/11 is a ridiculous fairy tale....

Last week, the probable next prime minister of Japan, Yukihisa Fujita, grilled current prime minister Fukuda for half an hour about the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and the staged events at the Pentagon and asked whether the Japanese police could arrest George W. Bush for his complicity in 9/11. Why wasn't that front page news?....

[M]y reputation has been ruined, at least in the eyes of the fewer and fewer people naive enough to believe the mainstream media...

Today, we see this hilarious response:

Dear Editor: I am Yukihisa Fujita, a Japanese MP who was mentioned in a Jan. 26 letter to the editor by Kevin Barrett. I wish to correct two points in his letter:

1. I can never be the probable next prime minister because the prime minister of Japan has to be elected among Lower House MPs, while I am an Upper House MP! I do not have any position in the shadow Cabinet in the Democratic Party of Japan.

2. I never asked the Japanese police to arrest President Bush.

Yukihisa Fujita,

Japan

Some things aren't in the news because — unexciting as it may be to the mind of the conspiracy buff — they didn't happen.

How I feel today in New York.

It's a real phenomenon: conservatives for Obama.

There's something strange going on. You see it in this caller to yesterday's Rush Limbaugh show (subscriber link):

CALLER: But, Rush, what I wanted to say was (sigh) I'm a Christian conservative and a loyal Republican. I voted every year, every election cycle since 1984. So I'm pretty depressed today because this is the first time that I found myself in a position where I will not vote for the nominee. In fact, hell will freeze over before I'll vote for McCain -- or Huckabee, for that matter. I'm going to sit home this year, and my husband says he is, too. I also want to say that, it's really true what you said about Obama. He doesn't scare me. I'm not afraid of him. In fact, I may even vote for him against McCain.

RUSH: You won't do that when you find out what Obama's policies are.

CALLER: Well, you know what? I know that he's very liberal. I know that.

RUSH: Just think of a nice Hillary Clinton, in terms of policy.

CALLER: You're right. You're right.

RUSH: Maybe even worse, if that's possible.

CALLER: But he's very likable.

The man has powers. Obama, I mean. Rush too, but not the same way. He's got to see this is a real problem. Conservatives voting for Obama. What's that?

Let me add that next line to that exchange: After the caller's "But he's very likable," Rush says, "Yeah, and that matters in a television age." I hear a wistfulness there from the man who is so big on radio but not so much on TV.

ADDED: It wasn't that long ago that Barack Obama said, "I want some Obama Republicans, some Obamacans."

Bill Clinton, in self-reflective mode.

Are you perceiving sincerity here? If so, are you thinking: Sincerity — if you can fake that, you've got it made?

Did McCain say he'd pick judges like John Roberts but he draws the line at Samuel Alito?

Dahlia Lithwick examines the question:

[W]hat McCain reportedly said makes no real sense, given that (1) McCain neither knows nor claims to know much about courts and the Constitution, and (2) Justice Alito was never seriously believed to be more conservative or even more overtly conservative than John Roberts. It's also worth pointing out—as did professor Stephen Bainbridge—that McCain has been solidly pro-Alito from day one.

But Lithwick says it doesn't matter whether McCain cared about some distinction he thought he saw between Roberts and Alito:

[W]hen McCain constructs his legal team, he will have just one institutional framework from which to pick—the same movement conservatives that produced Roberts and Alito. The only thing that really matters now is that McCain has already agreed to fall in line.

I'm sorry, Dahlia, but that doesn't make sense to me. McCain has embraced the generality of a conservative judge, but within that category, there will always be an array of judicial minds. Once he is elected, he'll be choosing from that array, and it remains fair to wonder whether he will pick more flexible pragmatic judges like O'Connor and Kennedy.

In fact, I think that is the line he probably perceived between Roberts and Alito — if he said what he's reputed to have said. I think people at the time did see a distinction like that, and even if McCain doesn't have a deep, lawyerly knowledge of law, he very well may have heard talk that Alito was more of an ideological conservative and Roberts had a instinct toward moderation and consensus.

But this is not a criticism of McCain. It makes me more willing to trust him to pick judges. I think Lithwick, on the other hand, would like moderates and liberals to turn away from McCain. She portrays him as an instrument of a monolithic conservative "institutional structure that has become the only game in town," because — I suspect — she wants us to vote for the Democrat.

This makes me want to look back to one of the conference calls McCain did with bloggers, in which I asked him about Supreme Court appointments:

I got my question in just now, which was to invite him to talk about what sort of person he would put on the Supreme Court, and specifically if he would strengthen a conservative majority or if he would work with liberals and others who care about preserving the balance that we've had on the Court for so long. He said he wanted, above all, a person with "a proven record of strict construction." This is "probably a conservative position, but," he said, "I'm proud of that position." He wants judges who won't "legislate." Then, he added that "this is new" and something we may not have heard: he'd like someone who had not just judicial experience but also "some other life experiences," such as time in the military, in a corporation, or in a small business. He would like to see "not just vast judicial knowledge, but also knowledge of the world."

I wish I'd written more at the time, but if I recall correctly, he kept going back to the idea of "strict constructionism," and I could not get him to break that down into any preference that had to do with outcomes. It's safe but opaque to assert that you want judges who won't legislate. Virtually every judge will insist — and probably even believe — that he or she does not legislate and properly says "what the law is."

Yet this idea of appointing a justice with "knowledge of the world" suggests that he would favor judicial minds that are more flexible and pragmatic and not woodenly ideological. And perceiving a line between Alito and Roberts is about exactly the same thing.

"So, was it good for the Mormons?"

Libby Copeland asks:

Romney seemed so Mormon, so squeaky clean, so Pollyanna-ish, even. (Remember when he went to Michigan and said he could bring those lost jobs back?) Romney's seeming normalcy isn't the norm anymore. Maybe we understand better those who've strayed or failed and recovered -- or, for that matter, those who aren't fabulously successful and can't put tens of millions into their own campaigns. Maybe we relate to the family lives of other candidates, candidates who have been divorced, who have blended families, whose children don't all campaign with them (and may not even like them). Sure, they're messier, but messy is authentic.

There was more to it than that, of course. Some evangelical voters -- who don't want messy -- see Mormonism as something other than Christianity. Mike Huckabee, an evangelical and former pastor, was speaking to them when he said, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers?"

That is, we saw 2 kinds of prejudice — one for each end of the American cultural spectrum.

"Oh don't. Stop it. Stay true to your tradition. You're CNN. Don't do it!"

Angelina Jolie shames CNN.

(And now that I'm linking to Gay Socialites — which, by the way, promotes Hillary Clinton after each post — and because I've got the theme of masculine beauty and comedy going this morning, look at this — maybe not if you're at work.)

(Bonus question: Why do gay men love Hillary?)

"Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, the new President of Texas!"

Nice.